Art gallery

Dakota, or What’s a Heaven For?

Brenda K. Marshall’s novel, Dakota, or What’s a Heaven For?, is set in 19th-century Dakota territory. The idea for the cover illustration was suggested by this evocative passage in the text: “The wagon turned off the road and directly into the prairie, setting out upon a land both solid and fluid, in which swell after swell of grass rhythmically lifted away from horizon and rolled toward another. The tall grass, parted by the horse and pressed down by the wheels, sprang up and closed behind the wagon, erasing its passage as thoroughly as waves forgot the passing of a ship.”

Go Home Now, Your Wife Has Already Got All She Asked For In this collection of Grimm Tales, I wanted to create illustrations that are more like theatre posters rather than very detailed book illustrations. I thought the visual language of posters would work here since these classic tales, which are burned into our collective consciousness, are so familiar I felt I had the creative freedom to apply a more minimalistic approach.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire

I was asked to illustrate a jacket for a book subtitled Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever. I set out to represent some of the musicians written about in the book, as well as to put them in an environment that gave the feeling of New York City in the mid-1970s. This required a careful process of building a detailed composition piece-by-piece while creating an overall gestalt that conveyed the desired impact.

Smiling Dish

It all started as a huge mistake. As an illustrator, I used the only tools I had to convince my son Yoel to eat. Every evening I prepared a new smiling dish for dinner. I’m not better than any other mom, I only wanted him to remember as he grows up that I tried my best. So I took pictures of the plates before serving. The funny thing was I failed to upload a little movie to Facebook, and instead uploaded the pictures of the smiling dishes. The response was overwhelming. Since then I was invited to share my plates on a weekly basis on one of Israel’s biggest web platforms, Xnet, and I have been doing it for the last year.

Zombie in Love

Mortimer is a zombie looking for love, and in this particular spread, he is feeling forlorn at home. I wanted to pack all kinds of little monster stuff in his house with him, and I felt that he needed a few pals to feel less lonely, so the worms are helping him around the house and enjoying themselves. I used a very earthy palette because Mortimer is a zombie and he lives in a grave made of earth.

We Shared a Bear Suit

Missed Connections, Love, Lost and Found, began as a personal illustration project in the form of a blog. Every day for the past three years I have gleaned the Missed Connections section of Craigslist for the funny, strange, tender, sad and hopeful messages posted by lovelorn strangers, and turned them into drawings. Fifty or so have been gathered in a book, published by Workman in 2011.

The real fellow in “We Shared a Bear Suit” wrote to me after his friend stumbled on the blog and recognized him. He never found his bear-girl, but has since met someone equally delightful.

“In one swoop all my Flowers were torn up by the roots and lay about me—scattered, broken, trampled … ”
From Ivan Turgenev’s novel First Love, for Sheri Gee of The Folio Society. The frame story opens with a brief scene in which three Russian gentlemen propose to amuse themselves by recounting the stories of their first loves. The protagonist, Vladimir, recounts the memory of his very unusual first love when he was 16 years old. In the narrative, Vladimir is very young and knows nothing about love. When he meets Zinaida, a beautiful 21-year-old woman, he is struck with her beauty and grace. She fails to reciprocate Vladimir’s love. The story has a tragic conclusion.

Monte Beauchamp is an award-winning art director and graphic designer whose work has appeared in Graphis, Communication Arts, SPDA, Print, American Illustration, and many editions of the Society of Illustrators Annual of American Illustration. He has received numerous awards and honors, and has served as a juror for American Illustration and the Society of Illustrators.

He is the founder and editor of the graphics/illustration/comics annual BLAB! His books include: The Life and Times of R. Crumb (St. Martin’s Press), Striking Images: Vintage Matchbook Cover Art (Chronicle Books), The Devil in Design (Fantagraphics), New and Used BLAB! (Chronicle Books), and many more.

In addition, he is the founder, editor, and designer of BLAB! PictoNovelettes—a series of storybooks for adults presented in a faux-children’s book format. Titles include: Sheep of Fools by Sue Coe and Judith Brody, Old Jewish Comedians by Drew Friedman, The Magic Bottle by Camille Rose Garcia, and several others.

A lifetime fine artist, Steve Henderson pursued a successful career in illustration before turning to fine art fulltime. His paintings are sold and displayed nationwide through exhibitions, shows, and galleries.

About his art, Steve says: "I look for, and paint, beauty, as a counteracting effect of our media-saturated fascination with ugliness. Yes, the world is a brutal place, but it is also our home. There is peace, serenity, quietude, thoughtfulness, majesty, grace, joy, and hope in this home of ours -- and that is what I paint."

The Hamilton King Award, created by Mrs. Hamilton King in memory of her husband through a bequest, is presented annually for the best illustration of the year by a member of the Society. The selection is made by former recipients of this award and may be won only once.

The Richard Gangel Art Director Award was established in 2005 to honor art directors currently working in the field who have supported and advanced the art of illustration. This award is named in honor of Richard Gangel (1918–2002), the influential art director at Sports Illustrated from 1960 to 1981, whose collaboration with illustrators during that period was exceptional.

Though best known as a painter of incidents on the streets of New York, John Sloan began his career as an illustrator, and the lessons of illustration remained central to his practice. Between 1892 and 1915, illustration was Sloan’s primary means of support, and his illustrations appeared in newspapers, books, and magazines, and on advertising posters. Sloan’s illustration work inflected his paintings and etchings, helping to shape his interests and his technique.

Born in 1871 in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, Sloan moved to Philadelphia with his family at the age of five. He grew up in a household that prized books, periodicals, and prints, and the earliest evidence of Sloan’s artistic talent comes in the form of drawings added to his 1883 copy of Treasure Island. Using ink, watercolor, and pencil, the young Sloan produced three half-page illustrations, penned tiny images in the table of contents, and even added his name to the title page. Produced when the artist was around age 12, these drawings foreshadowed Sloan’s future vocation.

Sloan’s career as a professional illustrator began while he was still in his teens. As a young man, he was forced to leave the prestigious Central High School to help support his family, and one of his early jobs was at A. E. Newton, where he produced cards, gift books, and other novelties. Many of these items were produced as etchings, a medium he taught himself in the late 1880s. For Newton, Sloan depicted the homes of famous poets, designed pretty calendars, and etched Thoughts from Tennyson. His delicate, precise renderings reveal a flair for decoration, which helped him earn a position on the staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1892.

That year Sloan rented a studio on Chestnut Street with another illustrator, Joe Laub. He also began classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and met the painter Robert Henri, who had just returned from study in Paris. Sloan’s diverse interests are apparent in the business card that he produced about that time. On the card, etched with architectural and foliate motifs, Sloan promoted his skills in designing, etching, illustrating, advertising sketches, and lettering. Sloan continued at the Inquirer until he received a better offer from the competing Philadelphia Press. At these newspapers, Sloan produced a wide range of illustrations, including on-the-spot news pictures, though it quickly became apparent that this was not his strength, unlike his friends William Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn who excelled at rapid sketches.

Sloan specialized in decorative work, like headings, puzzles, and illustrations for fiction and the society pages. He studied French and English illustrators, including Daumier, Gavarni, Leech, and Du Maurier. He developed an elegant personal style, using flat patterns and sinuous lines that drew on French art nouveau and Japanese woodblock prints. Sloan was part of the emerging aesthetic of the poster style. His stylized illustrations began to appear in advertisements and little magazines, like Moods and The Echo, and on book covers, as well as in the Philadelphia papers. With Shinn, Sloan attempted to launch a magazine named and patterned after the French Gil Blas, with illustrations by his expanding circle of friends. These little magazines were very short-lived, but at the end of the decade Sloan’s elegant illustrations began to appear in books and mainstream magazines. By that time, his presence was strong at the Press where he produced puzzles for the Sunday supplement. In 1900, his puzzles became full-page color features that invited readers to send their solutions to the newspaper for a ten-dollar prize.

Around that time, under the influence of Henri, Sloan was beginning to paint more seriously, producing portraits and scenes of life in his Philadelphia neighborhood. His work for the Press was supplemented with a major commission to etch illustrations for a luxurious edition of the works of the French author, Charles Paul de Kock, published by Frederick J. Quinby Co. of Boston. In all, Sloan produced 53 etchings for the series. His images include humorous character studies and groups of figures interacting in the streets, gardens, and drawing rooms of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. The De Kock commission honed Sloan’s abilities as an etcher and earned him praise as an illustrator.

His reputation as an illustrator and his mastery of etching served him well when he moved to New York in 1904. His New York City Life set—a series of etchings featuring humorous glimpses of the streets and apartments of Sloan’s neighborhood—benefitted from the lessons learned producing the De Kock project. The City Life etchings, which were not illustrations, vividly conveyed the character of the city’s neighborhoods and residents through composition, pose, and expression.In moving to New York, Sloan followed several Philadelphia friends. Around the turn of the century, Henri, Shinn, Glackens, and George Luks had all relocated to New York, which had become the national center of art and publishing. As newspapers moved toward the use of more photographs, Sloan and his illustrator friends were forced to shift their


Halloween Puzzle. For The Philadelphia Press, October 27, 1901. Watercolor, pen and ink, graphite on paper board.

In moving to New York, Sloan followed several Philadelphia friends. Around the turn of the century, Henri, Shinn, Glackens, and George Luks had all relocated to New York, which had become the national center of art and publishing. As newspapers moved toward the use of more photographs, Sloan and his illustrator friends were forced to shift their focus toward magazines and books. Newspaper puzzles and cartoons remained sources of income for Sloan and Luks, but Sloan also sought commissions from Century, Collier’s, and McClure’s. His adoptive city provided the setting for some of Sloan’s most accomplished magazine illustrations, like his pictures for “The Steady” from 1905. In addition, he and his friends became increasingly interested in painting the people and places they encountered in New York.

Finding their city paintings frequently rejected from juried exhibitions, the group of friends, headed by Henri, began to organize alternative exhibitions. In 1908, Sloan, Henri, Shinn, Glackens, and Luks received an enormous amount of press attention when they exhibited together—with three other friends, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast—at Macbeth Galleries. Portrayed as a protest against the conservatism of the National Academy of Design, the show was a huge success attracting publicity, visitors, and sales. The group became known as the Eight and the exhibition toured around the country. None of Sloan’s work sold, however, and he supported himself that year, in part, by illustrating Ralph Bergengren’s humorous pirate tales in Collier’s in a clever woodcut style. His style was popular with the author, and the stories were popular with the public. Sloan continued to illustrate Bergengren’s pirate tales for five more years, even as he became increasingly engaged with Socialist politics.

Author and artist Edward St. John Gorey was a child prodigy, drawing pictures at the age of two, and reading (self-taught) by the time he was three. Excelling at school, he skipped some early grades and arrived at Chicago’s legendary Francis Parker School in the ninth grade. An exceptional student, he contributed to many school events, exhibited in the annual art shows, and appeared in various school publications. When he was 13, a Chicago newspaper published his cartoons in its sports pages—Gorey’s first commercial work.

Having received the highest regional scores on his college boards, Gorey was offered scholarships to Harvard and other academic institutions. After graduating from Francis Parker when he was 17, with pending draft notices, Gorey postponed university and enrolled in art courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. He then entered the U.S. Army and served during World War II from 1943 until after the end of the war.

In 1946 he enrolled at Harvard, where he occasionally made the Dean’s List. He began pursuing artistic interests: publishing stories, poems, and illustrations in student publications; and designing sets, directing, and writing for the influential Poets Theatre (with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Alison Lurie, Violet Lang, and others). His illustrations appeared for the first time in a published book in 1950. Two years later he was offered a position in the art department of Doubleday Publishers in New York City. He became a serious admirer and frequent attendee of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet and would later often refer to Balanchine as a major influence on his work.

Gorey rapidly became a significant figure in the Doubleday art department. In 1953 he published his first book, The Unstrung Harp, an illustrated 64-page novella about the creative struggles of a novelist. The book stands today as one of the early precursors to the graphic novel movement in which both text and illustration tell the story. Graham Greene declared The Unstrung Harp “the best novel ever written about a novelist, and I ought to know!” The London Times referred to it as “a minor masterpiece.” Writing in The New Yorker, America’s pre-eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson gave Gorey his first early critical boost. Gorey’s 50 years of exceptional productivity had begun.

Gorey had established an association with New York City’s Gotham Book Mart in the early 1940s while still in the Army. As a voracious reader he began accumulating a unique library of some 25,000 books, many of which he had read more than once. When he came to the city to work he began making frequent visits to the bookshop and became a close friend of its founder, Frances Steloff. In 1961 he launched The Fantod Press, his own private press imprint and sold many of his copies through the Gotham Book Mart.

As early as 1939 Gorey had begun exhibiting his art work at the Francis Parker School, and continued to exhibit during his Harvard years at the Mandrake Bookshop, and as far away as California. In December of 1967, Gotham Book Mart announced the opening of a second-floor art gallery in its brownstone and invited Gorey to be among its first newspaper published his cartoons in its sports pages—Gorey’s first commercial work.

Having received the highest regional scores on his college boards, Gorey was offered scholarships to Harvard and other academic institutions. After graduating from Francis Parker when he was 17, with pending draft notices, Gorey postponed university and enrolled in art courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. He then entered the U.S. Army and served during World War II from 1943 until after the end of the war.

In 1946 he enrolled at Harvard, where he occasionally made the Dean’s List. He began pursuing artistic interests: publishing stories, poems, and illustrations in student publications; and designing sets, directing, and writing for the influential Poets Theatre (with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Alison Lurie, Violet Lang, and others). His illustrations appeared for the first time in a published book in 1950. Two years later he was offered a position in the art department of Doubleday Publishers in New York City. He became a serious admirer and frequent attendee of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet and would later often refer to Balanchine as a major influence on his work.

Gorey rapidly became a significant figure in the Doubleday art department. In 1953 he published his first book, The Unstrung Harp, an illustrated 64-page novella about the creative struggles of a novelist. The book stands today as one of the early precursors to the graphic novel movement in which both text and illustration tell the story. Graham Greene declared The Unstrung Harp “the best novel ever written about a novelist, and I ought to know!” The London Times referred to it as “a minor masterpiece.” Writing in The New Yorker, America’s pre-eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson gave Gorey his first early critical boost. Gorey’s 50 years of exceptional productivity had begun.

Gorey had established an association with New York City’s Gotham Book Mart in the early 1940s while still in the Army. As a voracious reader he began accumulating a unique library of some 25,000 books, many of which he had read more than once. When he came to the city to work he began making frequent visits to the bookshop and became a close friend of its founder, Frances Steloff. In 1961 he launched The Fantod Press, his own private press imprint and sold many of his copies through the Gotham Book Mart.

As early as 1939 Gorey had begun exhibiting his art work at the Francis Parker School, and continued to exhibit during his Harvard years at the Mandrake Bookshop, and as far away as California. In December of 1967, Gotham Book Mart announced the opening of a second-floor art gallery in its brownstone and invited Gorey to be among its first exhibitors. He exhibited there for the next 32 years, until his death. As a result of this association, Gotham Book Mart began to occasionally publish new Gorey works and eventually arranged for Gorey illustrations to appear in works by Samuel Beckett, John Updike, and others.

The theater had always interested Gorey and he was soon involved in off-Broadway productions. Eventually, his own experimental plays were produced on Cape Cod in the summertime, using local amateur actors and even puppets, to the delight and puzzlement of the local community. In 1973 Gorey designed a production of Dracula for a small theater on Nantucket Island. It attracted considerable interest, and in 1977 opened on Broadway as Edward Gorey’s Dracula. A huge commercial success with extraordinary reviews, it garnered two Tony Awards for Best Revival and Best Costumes, ran for almost three years, and had road companies across America, in London, Australia, and elsewhere.

Gorey’s work received serious critical reviews and high praise; his books have been translated into 15 foreign languages (beginning in 1961 with his Swiss German publisher Diogenes Verlag). In 1972 he published his first anthology, Amphigorey, containing 15 of his early works. The New York Times selected it as “One of the Five Noteworthy Art Books of 1972.” Three more anthologies followed (Amphigorey Too, Amphigorey Also, and Amphigorey Again), and have now become Gorey classics and the cornerstones of his large body of work. His strong interest in book design eventually expanded into various forms, including miniatures, pop-up books, books with movable parts, and other unusual formats. Over 150 book designs and hundreds of periodical illustrations are listed in his bibliography and are now much sought after by Gorey enthusiasts.

“Writing is always a dreadful, tiresome business and the worst of all tortures for me, because I am convinced that I am not a writer but a graphic workman, a painter who hangs pictures in a row, who collects imagery, and my problem is always to find one for a beginning and one for an end and then, something to hang in the middle so that it resembles a book,” said Ludwig Bemelmans.

Graphic workman, painter—whatever he called himself, Bemelmans belongs in the Pantheon of illustrators. A relentless connoisseur of life, he drew with a child’s eye and wrote with the shrewd wit of an adult. He knew everyone worth knowing, went everywhere worth visiting, all the while recording what he saw on the backs of menus, envelopes, or on the inside covers of matchbooks. His resumé was a checkerboard: hotelier, restaurateur, cartoonist, ad man, theatrical designer, novelist, screenwriter, interior decorator, journalist, and children’s book author. What made Bemelmans such a creative power-house? He confessed, “My greatest inspiration is a low bank balance.”

His best-remembered work, of course, is the series of picture books starring that beguiling schoolgirl, Madeline. “I like to write for children because I suffer from a sort of arrested development. I am about six years old really,” Bemelmans said, “and I am constantly surprised by everything.” He knew that the Madeline books were his lasting legacy, yet it surely would have surprised him to find that they have sold upwards of 13 million copies, and that the thriving Madeline merchandise empire now encompasses DVDs, dolls, board games, backpacks, tea sets, and stickers.

Bemelmans’ world ranged from yachts and limousines to garrets and subways, and was peopled with moppets, jewel thieves, Ecuadorian Generals, and feather boa-clad vamps. His drawing style, humorous and reductive, captures all this in a flash. “I sketch with facility and speed,” he wrote. “The drawing has to sit on the paper as if you smacked a spoon of whipped cream on a plate.”

Born in Meran, Austria, and bred in Tyrolean hotels, Bemelmans came to the States at 16 and landed at the Ritz-Carlton. There he learned “to press a duck, open a bottle, and push a chair under a lady.” While working his way from busboy to banquet manager, he drew, often using William Randolph Hearst’s empty suite as his studio. The Ritz staff and clientele provided him with a rich menu of subjects, and he returned again and again to hotel life for inspiration.

He first set his heart on becoming a cartoonist. His earliest effort, The Thrilling Adventures of Count Bric A Brac (1926), ran for six months, but his big break happened when May Massee of Viking Press came to dinner. Admiring the scenes Bemelmans had painted on the blinds, Massee announced: “You must write children’s books!” Hansi (1934), a reminiscence of his childhood, was quickly followed by three more: The Golden Basket (1936), The Castle Number 9 (1937), and Quito Express (1938).

Bemelmans met and married Madeleine (Mimi) Freund in 1934. The two honeymooned in Belgium, which provided the setting for The Golden Basket, his Newbery-Honor winner. Not many realize that Madeline makes her debut in this book. Madeleine, spelled like his wife’s name here, is one of 12 little girls shepherded by a tall nun through the streets of Bruges.

In 1938, Bemelmans, Mimi, and their two-year-old, Barbara, traveled to France. On the recommendation of Georges, an underworld friend, Bemelmans visited the Ile d’Yeu off the coast of France. Here came more inspiration for Madeline when he was knocked off his bike by a truck. He had to walk to the hospital, where, he wrote, “in the next room was a little girl who had had her appendix out, and on the ceiling over my bed was a crack that, in the varying light of morning, night and noon, and evening, looked like a rabbit.”

He went on: “I remembered the stories my mother had told me of life in the convent school at Altotting, and the little girl, the hospital, the room, the crank on the bed, the nurse, the doctor, all fell into place. I made the first sketches on a sidewalk table outside the Restaurant Voltaire . . . The first words of the text were written on the back of a menu in Pete’s Tavern on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Irving Place in New York.”

Digital pioneer Nancy Stahl began her love of exploration when she was in high school, where, as the second best artist in her class, she drew posters for plays and events, and spent long hours in her room creating and experimenting with everything from encaustic painting to oils to pen and ink.
After attending a large university for two years, Stahl transferred to Art Center College of Design. There she discovered that a strong sense of competition was a great motivator for her, as she and her classmates pulled all-nighters to complete their assignments and met up for eggs and toast in the morning to compare their work before class.

Paul Hardy, Stahl’s close friend until his death in 2001, left Art Center in 1970 to move to New York City, where he worked with Tony Russell and Kit and Linda Hinrichs at the newly-formed Russell & Hinrichs Studio. When Stahl left school and moved to New York, she got regular freelance assignments from the studio, while holding down a day job in the garment district painting swatches of textile prints. In the early years of her freelance career, she worked in diverse styles and media to satisfy the wide range of the studio’s assignments. She expanded her client list, and after a couple of years she was able to go completely freelance.

She had become known—and popular—for her colored pencil work when she was inspired by the work of Ludwig Hohlwein. She developed a Hohlwein-inspired retro poster style on a gouache portrait of Clark Gable and promoted it to art directors. This was a turning point. With this new boldly graphic poster style, Stahl hit her stride and expanded her clientele beyond editorial work for magazines and newspapers.

Then, in 1985, an assignment to illustrate an article about the battle of the sexes within families gave her the inspiration for further exploration. This time she created an updated spin on Heroic Realism to express the domestic power struggle.

Stahl had always wanted to hit on a “formula” that would allow her to work without recreating herself for each assignment. The only problem was, she says, “As soon as I had the formula worked out, I didn’t want to do it anymore. I was bored. I had to force myself to do it, and it was really painful to do every assignment like the one before.” While she was struggling to find something new to make the assignments personally more interesting, she heard about an offer being made by a post-production company called Charlex. They invited illustrators to come after hours to learn how to create digital art on their big mainframe computers. This was in the late ’80s, when digital art was in its infancy, and Nancy decided to give it a go.

After her very first try at it, she was hooked. Left alone in the office after everyone but the cleaning crew had gone for the day, Stahl sat at the work station, “The next thing I knew it was five o’clock in the morning! I was completely wrapped up in it, it was so fantastic. I came home and slept for maybe an hour; I was going crazy with dreams of cutting things out and moving them around. I was so excited. I woke up and couldn’t wait to call them. Which I did, ‘I want to come back! I want to come back!’ I had felt so boxed in by the way I was working, and this was like magic: I could paint, I could draw, I could do line work, I could do anything I wanted it to do!”

Stahl was still painting in gouache to fulfill assignments for her freelance work. Once she was able to purchase a Mac, she taught herself a new process by creating the job digitally on her computer at the same time as she worked on the traditional painting, so she could see how to make her digital work look like her traditionally painted work. And that’s where she broke ground: her digital work looked the same as her traditional work; it had all the stark power and sophistication of the gouache paintings that had already made her a top-rung illustrator. Only now she was using a brand new tool with which to create and experiment.

This was in the early ’90s, at the very beginning of the digital revolution, and Stahl was in the forefront, breaking digital illustration ground, creating work that was as fluid and personal and as graphically powerful as the gouache paintings that had already made her famous. She had been invited out to Mountain View, California, by Adobe to test-drive the unreleased new program Photoshop; the inventors of the program Painter called and asked to visit her in her studio; she was featured in Communication Arts, Step-by-Step, Print, and Peachpit Press Illustrator Wow and Painter Wow books. Most of all, she was excited by the new ways of drawing and painting she was discovering and inventing.

“I would wake up every single day like it was Christmas morning, so excited to get on the computer. It was like falling in love, for real, after going on a lot of blind dates. It was all-consuming for me. I was up till four or five in the morning; I’d sleep for a couple of hours, and then I’d wake up with a start, ‘What if I tried this? What if I tried that?’ I could barely eat, I was so excited.”

Yet contrary to what one might expect of such a minimal line, Blechman’s every last pen stroke is purposely, often excruciatingly composed. He has been known to draw dozens of tiny squiggly noses, for instance, on adhesive-backed paper until the right one materializes; then he meticulously cuts it out with an Xacto knife and pastes it onto the image. The final drawing is pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. And as studied as this process is, the end product is the perfect marriage of comedy and emotion—accomplished through signature gestures.

When Blechman’s art was on its ascent during the late fifties and sixties, he bucked the prevailing style of gag cartoons. With the notable exception of James Thurber’s primitive scrawls and Robert Osborn’s expressionist brush strokes, abstraction was frowned upon. Blechman’s abstract linear economy was innovative, but so were his themes. The 1953 adaptation of The Juggler of Our Lady, which prefigured today’s graphic novels by decades, was not the usual cartoon or comic fare. Likewise, his 1977 No Room at the Inn, a retelling of the nativity myth, was surprisingly warm and spiritual. His drawing is a form of writing and his writing brilliantly complements his drawing.

It is tempting to refer to Blechman’s wit as deadpan, but that designation does not take into account the inherent joy that pervades even the most somber work. His 1966 Christmas Message, broadcast for many years on CBS, is an animated, ecumenical paean to the season that resonates to this day. A lumberjack, standing before a tree, uses his saw as a violin and plays a Christmas carol. In the tree are birds and therein is the tension between holiday tradition, consumerism, and the human condition. In the hands of more slapstick cartoonists the humor might be there, but not the cathartic power.

Blechman is a “perfectionist.” Witness his first feature film, Igor Stravinsky’s heartbreaking The Soldier’s Tale. The intense energy it cost to make the outcome flawless, drained seemingly indefatigable resources. For him, as an independent producer, to engage in such a mammoth undertaking before the age of CGI, showed not only commitment to his art, but also a devotion to narratives that go deep into his persona. This was no easy task. Adapting this tale of war and its ravages to the screen was difficult enough. To make a story compelling with nervously drawn characters took him years. But from the moment it premiered, viewers were pulled into Blechman’s universe. It was not simply an animated rendition of a classic work, it was a total sensory experience that transcended the existing paradigms of animation and filmmaking. And yet it is a cartoon.

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1960, Laszlo Gulyas graduated at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts. Laszlo continued his studies as a student of the Academy of Fine Arts between 1983 and 1987. He has been member of the National Society of Hungarian Artists since 1987.

The artist developed his individual world of images and acquired the painting techniques of the early masters of painting under the influence of the universal art of Rembrandt. This is what makes him distinct form his contemporaries. He seems to be charmed by the revival of heritage rather than by demolishing the art of painting or by recording its death struggle. In his works he applies the contrastive effects of the light and the shade with brilliant skills. Besides the clear colours his sketching appears to be remarkable.

John Currin (born 1962) is an American painter based in New York City. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models. He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body. "His technical skills", Calvin Tomkins has written, "which include elements of Old Master paint application and high-Mannerist composition, have been put to use on some of the most seductive and rivetingly weird figure paintings of our era."

Don Maitz is an American science fiction, fantasy, and commercial artist. His most widely-known creation is the "Captain" character of the Captain Morgan brand of rum, although he is perhaps most notable for twice winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, science fiction's highest honor for an artist. His peers in the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists have honored him ten times with a Chesley Award for outstanding achievement, and he has received a Silver Medal of Excellence from the Society of Illustrators.
Don Maitz has published two books featuring his own works, entitled First Maitz and Dreamquests: The Art of Don Maitz. FPG (Friedlander Publishing Group). Don has also been included in the first book of series concentrating on artists who publish in the realm of Fantasy. This book is called "Fantasy Art Masters: The Best Fantasy and Science Fiction Artists Show How They Work".

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish painter, who is widely acknowledged to be the most important artist of the 20th century. A long-lived and highly prolific artist, he experimented with a wide range of styles and themes throughout his career. Among Picasso's many contributions to the history of art, his most important include pioneering the modern art movement called Cubism, inventing collage as an artistic technique, and developing assemblage (constructions of various materials) in sculpture.

by Miss Led (UK) missled.co.uk

“I’m attracted to the theatrical and playful side of Paloma,
which I kept in mind while creating the portrait. With the
eyelashes being the heaviest area of the piece, they were to
act as the pivotal part of the image. Eyes are so important in
my portraits – they have to be the hook to entice the viewer
in and also engage the gaze.
“Embellishing her cheeks with white dots over abundant
soft blush creates a good balance and acknowledgement of
these dramatic fanlike lashes. With this particular portrait,
it was more what I chose to eliminate rather than add. And
what I did include, how I could accentuate.
“My usual face shading is avoided here, in favour of a
clean, almost porcelain poster girl complexion. Using the
texture – brown envelope – I could bring in further marks,
incorporating white highlights that lift the piece.”